A financial company typically mails statements to its credit card members or banking customers on a monthly basis. The financial company may also frequently mail credit cards or banking cards to the customers for re-issues or replacements. In addition, the company may occasionally send letters to current or potential customers for various purposes. Millions of mail pieces are produced and delivered every month for these purposes. Though a costly process, mailing of the statements, cards and letters creates a valuable opportunity for the company and its partners to promote products and services to the customers. These mail pieces are usually guaranteed to reach a large number of families or individuals and are much more likely to receive attention than other types of mass mailings. Companies have long been taking advantage of this communication channel by including advertisements and solicitations in the outgoing statements or letters. These advertisements or solicitations or the like (hereinafter collectively referred to as “offers”) may take the form of a message, an insert, a billhead, a convenience check, an inner envelope or an outer envelope, for example. An offer typically describes a specific promotional program (e.g., one related to a financial or insurance product) that is offered by a business entity and is usually targeted at a specific group of customers.
It is a demanding task to manage offers and to incorporate them into outgoing mail pieces. For any given month, a large financial company may typically target hundreds of offers at millions of customers based on complex business rules. These offers need to be properly created together with associated rules, matched to appropriate accounts, produced on a variety of paper stocks, and inserted into outgoing mail pieces. This same or similar process is typically repeated several times (“cycles”) each month. The large volumes of mail pieces require considerable investment of resources, the successful return of which depends heavily on the accuracy, efficiency and consistency in the offer management process.
A number of problems and drawbacks exist in traditional solutions of offer management. In general, there has not been a streamlined end-to-end process for offer management. Existing solutions typically fail to integrate the various offer management steps, such as offer and rule creation, offer prioritization, rule optimization, weight management, insert production and inventory management, into a coherent cycle. As a result, there is usually a lack of coordination among the offer management steps as well as between the mailing cycles. For example, it is not uncommon for prior art systems to encounter overages (i.e., excessive inventory for a particular offer) or unexpected stock-outs (i.e., unavailable inventory for a particular offer), both of which could be costly.
Other problems and drawbacks also exist.
In view of the foregoing, it would be desirable to provide a solution for offer management which overcomes the above-described deficiencies and shortcomings.